Originally Posted by
t325
A general aviation aircraft arrival from STN. I had always assumed LGA doesn't have US CBP facilities, do they have them for GA aircraft? I was looking at past arrivals on FlightAware and the only ones I could find, other than that, were from Canada which has preclearance, no GA planes from elsewhere. So I find it odd that aircraft would be able to land there.
Airports have to have either "customs rights" or "international ports of entry" designation for flights arriving from outside the U.S. to land there, pre-clearance or not. So even if LGA does not have CBP to process pax, it must have the designations mentioned for any international flight to arrive.
Many U.S. airports have these designations even if there are no CBP officer stationed there (hence why a lot of U.S. airports with no int'l flights have "international" in their name). One airport which does (or did) not (and doesn't want to) is SNA. A decade or so ago, AS decided to start non-stop service from YVR to SNA, with preclearance in YVR. Well, the first flight landed there, ad couldn't be cleared. That ended that service right there and then (all flights after that stopped in SEA).